Pound for pound and year for year of experience, interns often give more, work longer, stretch themselves thinner and think more innovatively than their seasoned senior managers. At least that is the prevailing thought in the minds of many emerging professionals in a field where interns are all to often regarded as more of a liability than they are perceived as an asset. Of coarse the mistakes and naiveté inherent to those in internship will always make us less marketable and therefore less well compensated than other members of the design team. But if mistakes and the willingness to make them are the hallmark of learning then no one in a firm is learning more or
learning faster than the interns. This would seem to point out a fact that is all too often ignored, that of any asset in the office including computer hardware and software, interns have the potential to yield the highest return on investment by a wide margin.

Why then is it commonplace for firms to provide little or no structured mentoring of their interns? It seems that the prevailing wisdom among architects today is a desire to train and mentor through loose informal relationships in and among project team members. While this type of adhoc mentoring is crucial to certain aspects of design practice, the thought that interns will pickup every thing they need to learn this way is rooted in a romantic attachment to the antiquated system of apprenticeship. In the modern fast paced office the need to get up to speed on the details of practice makes the informal system of mentorship inefficient and wasteful to both employer and employee. If architectural internship is ever to become what it has to be firms must broadly accept the concept of mentoring as a partnership. Time spent teaching a recent college graduate the finer points of specification writing should not be regarded as time lost since that intern may not soon become the primary spec writer in the office. Rather, a few structured sessions on lessons learned and points to consider while selecting materials may in fact mitigate the risks otherwise imposed when interns do take part in guiding the design of critical building components.

Many fields from business consulting to law, medicine, accounting and the like devote weeks if not months per year to employee training. And yet in many cases architectural interns are expected to fend for themselves. While it is good experience to learn self sufficiency, broader and more complex concepts like constructability, consultant coordination, and budget management are next to impossible to pick up without some form of active structured mentoring. It is no wonder then why the average period of internship extends well beyond NCARB’s requisite 3 years. Complacency and procrastination play their roles too but a lack of sufficient mentoring from experienced architects means that many interns simply don’t feel as though they have been adequately prepared to become architects until as many as 7, 8, 9 or more years out of school.

Viewed more as a partnership than a time consuming burden, mentorship is the strongest possible vehicle to improving the state of the profession. Architects at every stage of their career should be incentivized through continuing education requirements to mentor in their own firm or through their local AIA component. The Emerging Professionals Companion and tools like it can become part of a ready made system of interactive learning sessions between senior staff and interns. The track record of employee retention at firms that continuously and actively make mentorship a top priority is undeniable. The next generation leaders of our profession are speaking with their feet in droves as they walk out the door of the firm and away from traditional practice every day. What is at stake is nothing less than the survival of our profession.